CHAPTER EIGHT
Louana
One minute, I was snapping at Seth and Finn, who had spent the entire day poking at me about Valen.
The next, I was watching something unfold like it was in slow motion, yet moving too fast to be able to stop it.
Cary’s woman, Abigail—who’d already been through so much hell in her life—was about to be taken.
And before I could even do anything, I was getting shot, Finn was getting shot, and she was gone.
I’d been hurt a lot in the past.
In training, on jobs that went sideways.
I’d been beaten and stabbed and grazed once with a bullet.
The pain from one actually going in and then back out of me, though? It was blinding. It was all I could focus on for a long minute, as I heard Seth yelling. First over where Finn had landed, then getting closer as he moved toward me.
“Stop. Stop moving. You’re hit,” he said, voice rough, but trying to be shot.
“Abigail,” I hissed as I rolled off my back and onto my good side.
“I know. I know. I have everyone else on it, okay? You need to stay still.”
“We have to do something,” I insisted, pushing up onto my knees, and the movement made bile rise up in my stomach.
“You need to stay fucking still, Louana,” Seth demanded, but it was too late. I was pushing past the nausea and getting to my feet.
“No. The rest of the club is doing it,” Seth said, grabbing me when I tried to go in the direction the truck that had taken Abigail went off in. “Goddamnit, Louana, stop. You are only going to get in the way right now,” he added.
That seemed to penetrate through the panic and the pain, making me stop.
“I couldn’t save her.”
“None of us did,” he said, taking some of the weight on his back. “Come on. We have to get you inside and looked at,” he said. “You’re covered in blood.”
I shook him off but made my way back to the apartment, deep breathing through the nausea the pain from climbing the steps caused.
In the apartment, I closed myself into the bathroom, needing a minute to myself. And, quite frankly, needing someone other than Seth around to check out a wound in my ass, of all places.
Right then, in one of my lowest moments, hurt, but also mad at myself and ashamed of myself for not being able to stop that poor woman from getting taken, was when he showed up.
Valen.
Some part of me wanted to tell him to fuck off, to accept help from anyone else.
A larger part of me, though, wanted him.
So I opened the door.
Then there he was.
An older version of the boy I had once known, a boy I’d fallen so hopelessly in love with, that I lost myself inside of him.
He was both soft and firm at the same time.
And it just… cracked something inside of me.